by Sean Thomas
Rebecca remembers something, a book she still has: a book on animals and evolution Patrick once gave her, to settle an argument they were having. Yes. Seized with her old scholastic glee, the thrill of the intellectual chase, the feeling she used to have researching Late Titian, Frankish Chronicles, Medieval Misogyny as Evidenced by East Anglian Witch Trials, Rebecca returns to the first cardboard box, searches through, and with a sigh of satisfaction takes out the book she remembered.
Biological Exuberance. Animal Homosexuality and Natural Diversity.
Smartly Rebecca starts filleting the book. She does not have to search for long: a few pages from where she begins, she comes to the section headlined ‘The Chimp’. In ‘The Chimp’ she reads that, in Chimps,
sexual relations are less than amicable: males occasionally try to force females to consort and mate with them by threatening and even violently attacking them
So? Rebecca nods, stubs out her cigarette, nods, lights yet another. As she does she wonders: did she ever used to smoke like this? Not caring to answer her own question Rebecca seeks out the section on the Orang-utan. What about the Orang-utan?
Rebecca finds the page, she reads that, in the Orang-utan
heterosexual relations are sometimes characterised by aggression and violence rather than pleasure and consensuality. Young males often chase, harass and rape females. During such interactions, which may account for the majority of copulations in some populations, the male may grab, slap, bite, and forcibly restrain the female, who struggles violently while screaming and whimpering
A pause; Rebecca smokes. She blows a semi-smoke ring at the wall and returns to the book. She reads that in the Savannah baboon
Hamadryas males often threaten and attack females, biting them on the neck to prevent them from leaving the group. Adult male Savannah baboons sometimes rape younger females
Nodding, absorbing, Rebecca turns pages and reads that in the Bonnet Macaque
Nineteen per cent of sex is non-consensual
and that in the Pig-tailed Macaque
Forty-eight per cent of homosexual mounts between females are non consensual.
She reads that in the Squirrel Monkey
females often form group of COALITIONS during the mating season to chase off males who are pursuing unwilling females
and that gangs of male Bottlenose Dolphins have been known to
harass adult females, chasing herding and even ‘kidnapping’ and attacking them (e.g. with charges, bites, tail slaps, and body slams) in an attempt to mate with them.
Rebecca stops; pauses; listens. She listens to her father listening to Mahler downstairs. Then Rebecca stoops her head and keeps reading. She reads that during mating, Northern Elephant Seals
routinely bite, pin down, and slam the full weight of their bodies against females (bulls are five to eleven times heavier than females)
and that, in the same species
a female may be pursued by groups of males as she leaves the rookery, sometimes being raped three to seven times as she tries to escape.
Paging on, she reads about Wild Cheetahs, where
adult males try to mount their mothers
and about the Peach-faced Lovebird, where
there is considerable sexual antagonism between the sexes in heterosexual pairs
as well as Grey Squirrels, where during
mating chases, as many as thirty-four males may pursue and harass a single female
She then reads about Snow Geese, which take part in
gang rapes
where
males gather together in large ‘spectator’ groups – sometimes containing as many as twenty to eighty males – to watch and perhaps even join in
and little Anna’s Hummingbird where
males pursue females in high-speed chases and sometimes even strike them in mid-air, forcing them down in order to copulate …
The book is nearly done, nearly finished. Only the section on Insects remains. Filing through these last pages, Rebecca comes upon genus Panorpa, the Japanese Scorpionfly. First she reads that, in the Scorpionfly
female body design has selected for elaborated male genitals because females have desired increasing amounts of vaginal stimulation through ever larger areas of physical contact …
and then she reads that ‘forced copulation’ in the Scorpionfly
is in no way abnormal or ‘aberrant’ behaviour, it is an aspect of the evolved behavioural repertoire of individual males that is widespread among species of the genus Panorpa.
* * *
Cigarette done, Mahler finished, book shut, Rebecca takes the book and drops it back in the box; then she gets up off her legs and crosses the floor to the window, and creaks the window further open. She is keen to lay the yashmak of cool air across her face, keen to enjoy the soothing mantilla of the night breeze.
The stars, the headlights, the gloaming.
Rebecca wonders.
She wonders that if … if all; if …
She wonders: where does all this leave her? Does this leave her anywhere particularly different? Does this mean she’s done the right thing? Maybe, maybe not, maybe it doesn’t. Standing at the window, Rebecca calms herself, as she tries to work it through. Just because every animal is guilty, she thinks, every animal a sinner, every animal worthy of prison, or worse, that does not exonerate her ex-boyfriend. Does it? No. Rebecca decides. It does; it doesn’t. Just because Brownmiller was wrong in this does not mean Brownmiller was wrong overall. Right? Wrong? What?
Right, Rebecca thinks, right. Just because Patrick is a Grizzly Bear, a Pronghorn Stag, a Bull Elephant Seal, that does not release him from responsibility for what he did.
But then, Rebecca thinks, if Patrick is just a Mohol, a Bonobo, a Hanuman Langur, what, and why, and where; where does that leave her? Standing in the windowed streetlight, Rebecca wonders, almost aloud, she almost mouths to the street, the warm summer-night air: then what was I, Patrick, was I your Anna’s Hummingbird, your Peach-Faced Lovebird, your Aztec Parakeet?
Or was I genus Panorpa? Your Scorpionfly?
A knock at the door: it is Rebecca’s mother.
Rebecca looks up as her mother puts her head around. Something about the way her mother looks as if she is trying not to look intrusive and careworn makes Rebecca think her mother is about to broach The Subject.
Sure enough:
— Um, Rebecca …
— Mum?
— About tomorrow … – With a careworn sigh her mother sits on the bed next to her eldest, blondest, once-most-favoured daughter; then Rebecca’s mother says – I was … well …
— Go on Mum
— Well um … we all know … roughly why you … did it
— Why I withdrew the charges?
— Yes
— So …?
— Well of course um darling we know why – Obviously struggling – It’s just that when … the police come round tomorrow to interview you you really don’t want to …
— What, Mum? Incriminate myself? Tell them I lied? What?
— Yes well yes …
— Oh, Mum
The two of them are six inches apart on the bed; Rebecca wishes she were in Edinburgh. Far far away, far away from all this. There is a pained silence; then Rebecca’s mother seems to abandon any pretence; she looks at her daughter’s Klee poster and says, loudly, to the wall:
— Why did you do it, Rebecca? If you still think he’s guilty? Why? Why do that to all of us? Why put us through this?
— Because. You know why
— Tell me again!
— Because he got life, Mum, Patrick got life imprisonment. I wasn’t remotely expecting that
— But … – Rebecca’s mother’s eyes are still on the poster – But that was because of his previous convictions … and anyway that’s nothing to do with you, darling – Rebecca goes to stand up, to get far away, but her mother puts a restraining hand on her arm – No, Rebecca, darling, listen, is it because
of those letters he sent you? All that pleading? Is it because you still love him? What is it? Tell me!
Forcing herself free of her mother’s hardening grasp, Rebecca rises. Then she goes barefoot to the window and stares at the road where 8EEN was. The evening is enclosing. Rebecca looks at the orange and charcoal of the sky; the westwards view across town; the black needle of Highgate Church. Her mother is still bleating from the bed:
— You know they’re letting him out of prison tomorrow
— I know, Mum, that’s why I’m here
— What do you think he’ll do? Then? Mmm? Come here? Come to see you? With a thank you present? Rebecca?
— Mum … – Rebecca leans further out the window, speaks to the polleny air – I don’t care. He didn’t deserve life in prison. That’s all. Whatever he deserved … he didn’t … deserve that
A door slams. The mother has gone. Rebecca turns to the night air, to feel the mourning veils of night air so cool on her face. Her eyes shut, Rebecca listens to the distant car music.
27
Later, shifting listless about her room, Rebecca listens to her parents doing their evening things, moving around the echoey house: she can hear her mother sorting stuff into the dishwasher; her father switching off the TV and selecting some music. Then a tap being turned; a kettle being boiled; two quiet phone calls taken one after the other. In her room Rebecca’s breathing is one with the mild breeze brought by her open casement window; the warm summer wind is bringing the Heath into the house.
Opening her eyes Rebecca hears: again: her mother’s voice from the hall: raised, tense, wired; the voice is answered by her father’s lower, softer, equally indistinct tones. A phone clicks up, and then down, and then the conversation resumes. Rebecca cannot quite hear what they are talking about but she thinks she knows they are talking about her: she can just about make out the words: tomorrow, the police, Patrick, Rebecca.
What else is there to talk about?
Her sudden retraction. Her change of heart. Her emancipation and exoneration of her rapist ex-boyfriend. Her ineffable stupidity; her incomparable selfishness.
The house is quieter. Rebecca can hear Richard Strauss and her parents’ urgent murmuring. Feeling the cool air blown in through her open window, Rebecca strains to listen. She hears her parents move from hall to sitting room to kitchen, still conversing, still debating. She hears them both pause at the foot of the stairs and talk in hushed tones; and this time she can hear the phrase ‘shall we tell her?’ After that she hears her father’s slow unurgent footsteps, as he climbs the stairs, crosses the landing, approaches the door to her bedroom.
Tensed, alert, agonised, Rebecca waits. Her father is standing on the landing outside her room. Rebecca stares at the blankness of her bedroom door. Her drying eyes do not blink; she stares at the door, staring hard, as if with effort she can see through, see her father standing beyond. Rebecca wonders what her corduroy-wearing oh-so-diffident Anglo-Jewish father is thinking; perhaps he is thinking about his daughter’s shameful and embarrassing retraction. Perhaps he is thinking about the possibility of Rebecca’s being charged with wasting police time. Perhaps he is thinking about replacing the landing carpet.
Whatever her father wants to tell her, Rebecca doesn’t want to hear. She is glad when her father seems, typically, to change his mind; when she hears him turn and pace downstairs again.
So?
So: enough: get out. Taking a pair of sandals from under her bed Rebecca kicks back a heel and slips her sandal on; she sits down on the bed to shoe the other foot; then she picks up a bag filled with her keys, some money, her mobile phone, and she gently nudges open the door.
Judging by the subdued noises, Rebecca’s mother and father are now watching TV in the distant kitchen. Quietly Rebecca shuts her old bedroom door and descends the stairs into the hallway darkness; quietly she opens the front door, steps outside, clicks the front door shut behind. Then she walks into the hush and the aromas of the garden, stepping between the trees, between the sweet deep throats of the night flowers.
Rebecca walks on, out of the garden, down the lamplit road, past the redbrick walls of the Heath boundary, and onto the Heath extension. Here, the moon shines over the yew trees; here cars are parading down the distant roads, their lights turning slowly like pairs of lanterns carried by dancers in a distant gavotte. Rebecca watches them as she pauses at the edge of the grassland, as she gathers her courage like her cardigan around her shoulders. Slowly she walks across the dark urban meadows, smelling that smell of cricket matches, cut rye grass, lime trees, summer-evenings-when-she-was-a-girl. It is good to be out of the house; to leave behind …
At the road Rebecca stalls; cars and bikes pass up and down. Rebecca waits. The evening traffic is doing things in a leisurely way; the traffic is heavy and persistent. Rebecca watches a police car, a tee-shirted girl on the back of her boyfriend’s motorbike, a council cleaning truck full of shirtless men; then she sees a space between and she crosses the road and re-enters the Heath; the Heath proper.
Now she is near Kenwood, near the rhododendron lanes, although their colours of red and pale violet and purple are bleached away by the darkness. Rebecca crosses through the colourless groves and takes another path into the oakwoods.
There, then, somewhere out there, Rebecca senses a bush rustling; through the gloom she spies a figure. Blithe, benign, seduced by the tranquil warmth of the evening, Rebecca follows the figure with her idle gaze; it is a man, disappearing. Curious, Rebecca looks, and sees another man, following. What?
Wondering if these men are what she thinks they might be, Rebecca passes out of the little wood onto a dais of grass; here she turns and surveys the south and she sees …
London. From here Rebecca can see the city stretched out on its carpet of jeweller’s velvet. She can see the sweet dark apricot of the city light tinting the sky; she can see the wheels and towers and domes of night-time London, lit up. London is looking like a city ripe for bombing, vulnerably lovely, en fête.
Finding a dryish piece of grass Rebecca sits and rests her chin on paired knees and looks out over the spread-out city lights; at her town.
And – yes – all – the – people. Rebecca thinks on them. Out there, living, breathing, dying, smiling; all the Londoners. All the Spanish girls in Bradley Street, the Aussie boys in Ealing pubs, the Americans everywhere. Rebecca thinks of them. The Asian girls with pink saris, in Southall dance halls. The murderers lifted away, in Wormwood Scrubs. The skinheads sluicing snakebite in old Chelsea taverns; the clerics eyeing the gold-tooled books in Lambeth Palace library; the E’d-up clubbers funnelling money into Dean Street jukeboxes. Yes, Rebecca sees them all: the Kiwis, the Londoners, the Belgians, the Georgians, the Armenians, the Cockneys, the Welshmen; the Arabs smoking hookahs on Edgware Road; French bankers downing Ferrari cocktails in South Ken; the fighting Irish in the Town & Country; alcoholic Wimbledon housewives opening bottles of Cab Sauv for themselves alone; the Turks and Cypriots selling smack in late-night Stoke Newington grocers, while black-tasselled Hassidim walk on by.
And Patrick. Amongst them all, Patrick.
Wishing not to feel this, Rebecca walks into the woods again. Through a fence-and-tree bottleneck Rebecca crosses a lawn into a woodier part of the Heath; here the moon is a scatter of silver dollars on the underwood floor, coined by the leaves of the full-summer oak trees. Rebecca smells a scent, hears a noise: some nervous laughter. Her blonde head turned Rebecca sees: another young man, standing by a bush. He is smoking. The cigarette he smokes glows redly, each time he draws, gauntly.
He is a signalling firefly in the cypress groves.
Closely Rebecca watches: sees another man walk across the dim smoky lawns. The second man ignores or fails to see Rebecca: he walks purposefully: towards. Rebecca thinks; sees; watches. She thinks of jaguars, night herons, flamingos, ocelots, parakeets, lyrebirds, roseate terns. She thinks of herself: a night heron winging its way across the waters, across the moonlit ria
of life. She thinks of the warped but ineluctable evolutionary urge that forces these men; that drives all these night birds together, towards risky sex, towards beauty and death, towards the head of the salmon river.
The other man has now crossed the short expanse of Hampstead lawn: he has crossed to meet the other younger man, attracted by the insect pheromones of the younger man’s smoking. The bleached-out blue of the younger man’s collarless shirt somehow matches the show of the younger man’s instep inside his chic leather sandals. Rebecca squints at the younger man, his leather sandals; the young man stands by the gloom of the night-time trees: nonchalant, cool, somehow very Noël Cowardesque and Twenties; like he has just returned from a game of long-trousered tennis.
Rebecca squints through the pixilation of her night vision to see the older man wrap his hand around the back of the younger man’s head and french him, unshavenly. The younger man vigorously returns this kiss; Rebecca stands wondering whether she should hide herself; whether the two gays have seen her and this sexplay is for her benefit; whether they haven’t seen her and this sexplay is for her benefit. In the dark Rebecca just about sees the clutch of a kiss; a white hand go down; the flash of a silver belt buckle. Then Rebecca hears jeans being sloughed; ardent murmurs, laughter. A cigarette is flicked away: spiralling red and then nothing. Rooted, Rebecca thinks. So here are the aliens, she thinks, here are the foreigners, here are the Aztecs of North London: with their freaky rituals, their strange cannibalism, their bloody rites: their joyous passing of the desert thorns through their penis-heads.
And as Rebecca watches the older man bend the younger man around and over so as to fuck him, she cannot but think of the gay male sex that she and Patrick used to have: the desperate, cottagey sex they used to have: even when they were safe and private, even when they were alone in her bedroom. Almost whenever they did it they did it like they were stuck in the urinal, like they’d met just then on a train, like the walls were covered with graffiti and blood. She would hoarsely whisper the wrong name; he would french her and thrust her jeans to the grass; she would bend round and let him bugger her, fuck her, whatever, just do me.
